Application of the Eikonal Approximation to Electron Scattering. I. Elastic Scattering from Spherically Symmetric Potentials

Abstract

A form of the eikonal approximation is presented which is slightly different from the familiar one found in the literature, but which reduces to it in the appropriate limit. The object of the paper is to investigate the possibility of using the eikonal theory to study processes which cannot be easily nor accurately studied by methods currently available. It is found that the eikonal theory is quite successful in reproducing partial wave results for elastic scattering on spherically symmetric potentials, and it is then proposed that it be used to study inelastic scattering processes for atoms and elastic processes for molecules.